Seagate faces class-action lawsuit over 3TB hard drive failure rates

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Almost a year ago, we covered Backblaze’s decision to phase out Seagate 3TB drives after seeing unacceptably high failure rates from one drive in particular, the ST3000DM001. Now, Seagate is facing a class action lawsuits brought on behalf of its customers who bought that particular model — and Blackblaze’s data is mentioned prominently in the suit.

Backblaze’s failure data as of April 2015

Seagate failure rates on the ST3000DM001 weren’t just far higher than other drives, they were also distributed differently. Normally, products follow what’s called a “bathtub curve” failure rate. That means an initial high period of failure as defective units die, followed by low overall failure rates until end-of-life, when hardware begins burning out. The Seagate drives in Backblaze’s storage pods did not exhibit this type of curve.

Backblaze 3TB failure data as of 2015

As of April 2015, just 6% of the original 3TB drives Backblaze purchased were still in service. This kind of data could be evidence of a significant problem with the drive family.

The complaint

The complaint notes that Seagate’s ST3000DM001 was the first 3TB drive to use three platters at 1TB each. This is in contrast to other 3TB drives then on the market, which used 4-5 platters to hit their 3TB densities.

The company made a number of marketing claims that emphasized the reliability of the ST3000DM001, including the claim that the annualized failure rate of the drive is less than 1% and non-recoverable read failure rate is extremely small. These figures are both highly suspect when used to calculate overall drive reliability, but they’re the only information that a hard drive manufacturer will typically release.

The class action suit leans heavily on the Backblaze report — and that’s where problems may arise.

Does Backblaze’s data accurately capture the failure rate?

The class action suit does offer the example of a plaintiff who purchased a drive, experienced an early failure, and then replaced it again with a warrantied drive that also failed. It also leans on the Backblaze information on the ST3000DM001 to support allegations that the drive family was broken.

This argument will hinge on whether Backblaze’s use of the drives in a commercial storage pod constitutes a proper environment for representative testing. I suspect Seagate will argue it does not. Seagate manufactures enterprise-class drives that are specifically designed for reliable operations in challenging environments, and the company will likely claim that the reason Backblaze saw such high failure rates on the ST3000DM001 is because they operated the drive incorrectly.

The fact that the Seagate drives failed in huge numbers while competitor drives did not could be evidence of a defect across the entire product line, or it could simply mean that the other consumer drives are over-engineered.

Death Star vs. Failacuda

If Seagate is smart, it’ll examine what IBM did during the 75GXP debacle — then do the opposite. For those of you who don’t remember: Once upon a time, IBM had a thriving HDD business. IBM Deskstar drives had a reputation for stability and reliability, so the launch of IBM’s 75GXP HDD, and the so-called “fairy dust” that IBM sprinkled on the drive to improve its density were both well received.

Failed drive heads on the infamous 75GXP. The drives acquired the nickname “Death Stars” due to their failure rates

Unfortunately, the honeymoon didn’t last. Customers quickly began to complain, first about early failures, then about repeated failures on replacement drives. As problems spread, publications tried to get in touch with IBM to discuss the issues. IBM’s official policy was to tell everyone, including the press, that it would honor the drive’s warranty and nothing else.

Whatever Big Blue thought it was accomplishing, it didn’t work. With no information on the size or scope of the problem, most publications publicly yanked their previous Deskstar endorsements. IBM wouldn’t tell anyone if the problems on the 75GXP also affected the 60GXP families, so customers steered clear of anything with an IBM label.

It’s hard to measure how much financial impact the disaster had on IBM, since it happened synonymously with the first dot-com crash, but the endless stream of uncertainty and overall negative PR did the company no favors. In the end, IBM sold its HDD line to Hitachi.

There’s little risk of Seagate taking a step that drastic — storage was a side business for IBM, but it’s Seagate’s entire focus. With that said, this is a situation that will be better served by frank admissions and service, not by stonewalling and subterfuge.

Tagged In

“If Seagate is smart, it’ll examine what IBM did during the 75GXP debacle — then do the opposite.”

Let’s see what IBM did..

1) “IBM’s official policy was to tell everyone, including the press, that it would honor the drive’s warranty”

2) “IBM wouldn’t tell anyone if the problems on the 75GXP also affected the 60GXP families”

Alright, thus Seagate should tell it’s customers that their warranties have expired as they no longer uphold them and in addition tell them that this also affects similar hard drives.

—

Perhaps it’d be better to write “do at least more than that.” rather than “do the opposite”.

Joel Hruska

Folatt,

Here was the problem with the IBM response in a nutshell:

1). While it promised to honor warranties, its replacement drives were dying as often as the originals. This created understandable concern from users, who saw the warranty ticking down as they cycled through replacements.

I saw 7 75GXP drives die within a year. Replacements died as well. IBM’s “We will honor the warranty” approach stopped working when people stopped trusting that the replacement drives would function.

2). They refused to clarify which products were impacted by this. The 60GXP and 120GXP families were considered suspect by association.

3). They refused to acknowledge the existence of an actual problem. They eventually were forced to do so, but for a long time IBM would not admit that the 75GXP even *had* an issue.

Mathew Binkley

We had hundreds of Seagate 3 TB drives, and yes they did fail like flies. On the plus side, Seagate’s RMA processs for returning bulk drives is vastly better than WD, which still requires you to fill out an entire form for each and every drive you return. Which is highly onerous when you’re shipping them back in boxes of 20.

Mike Valadez

The fact that they expedite RMAing in bulk is not exactly a good thing.

Ian Skinner

Nothing can top the epic fail of Micropolis SCSI drives of the late 90’s early 00’s.. just before they went out of business.. Lost a ton of rendered animation files.

Conservative411

Ahhhh you are the ONE that purchased a Micropolis drive. I heard rumors of an individual many years ago purchasing one of those dogs. It is a pleasure to meet a legend.

deV14nt

+1 makes it bigger. Right guys?!

JY

I remember the Micrapolis SCSI drives… they indeed sucked lemons.

GenMasterB

Another one that was very close to the Micropolis and Deskstar fiasco was the Quantum Bigfoot drives that were installed in Compaq Presarios around 1999/2000. They were 5.25″ beasts that were beyond slow and noisy, almost all failed and cost Quantum it’s company as well.. Didn’t help Compaq’s reputation either..

Mel Gross

Folatt, that’s a rather simplistic reading. What the article is actually saying, is that Seagate should be more open about what the failures are from, whether it affects other drives, and that they would do more than just replace the drive with another from the same, apparent, defective family.

Twenty years ago I learned the hard way to avoid Seagate HDDs like they were the plague. I’ve never had a problem with Western Digital nor, more recently, with Samsung SSDs (I always buy the “pro” version).

Solaris X

WOW my same experience with Seagate and WD.
The only difference being I bought many cheap WD Elements HDs instead of pro, but they are lasting a lot nonetheless.
(ok, after raising this flag, I’m sure they will all die today evening as soon I get home, LOL)

Riely Rumfort

Pro is unnecessary.. Very little to do with failure rates. If anything their higher performance gets warmer and would therein fail more frequently.

Conservative411

I agree but to each his own. Any Samsung SSD is better than anything else out there.

Riely Rumfort

They’re overpriced now but I used to trust Plextor as well.
Can’t wait to eventually have a Samsung 4TB SSD, pretty much my endgame, with maybe an m.2 for boot/programs. Based on what kind of performance the Intel LGA GT4e turns out to be in August, I may just have a Mini-STX based system, if not capable enough a Pascal GPU Laptop it is..

Fast_Turtle

And I’ve had exactly the opposite Experience with Seagates. Still have my 3TB (Yes it’s one of the supposedly affected drives) along with a 250 GB that area still in service. The 500 GB Barracuda needs Testing due to failure as the System it was in suffered file corruption that was possibly due to MB failure.

Solaris X

Good for you. I had many failures with Seagate, and not with one model only. On the other hand I think only one with Maxtor failed me back in the days. That drove me to never trust Seagate again for sure. They sure lost one client there. Now I find I was not the only one who had similar concerns.

BraveLabrador

Same here. Sure, I’ve had a single WD failure, but the drive warned me days before and was readable enough to copy all files.
I also have 2 old WD drives (160GB and 240GB) that in SMART one has status yellow and the other red, but they still work! They are still in a drawer, ready to be used in a case of emergency.
On the contrary, one Seagate failed, and it took weeks worth of important work with it (that was prior to Git, Dropbox and stuff).

Conservative411

I second your experience with Seagate. They were loud and slow and failed a lot. I also ONLY buy Samsung SSD. BTW nice name.

Tsakalos

I ve used many Sandisk ssd’s .. They are also great.. In the Ssd region, i ve seen very few failures.. But in Hdd… Totaly oposite…

Conservative411

I have used and installed hundreds of SSDs in the past five years. I have had very bad luck with everything besides Samsung. Not saying you need to agree with me but that is my experience.

Tsakalos

Well i havent installed hundreds.. I am honest.. But about 30-40 pieces, not a single failure… Which do u think is the worst in ssd region?

Conservative411

People don’t have to like what I like or even agree with me. I am just sharing my experience. What do I think is worst? I really don’t trust Crucial and OCZ for reliability and I don’t like Intel because they are overpriced and have poor specs in many cases.

TomLeogrande

I have lost 8 TB of WD HDD’s in the last year… and I only owned 8 TBs worth of drives. Absolute Garbage…. Seagates aren’t much better. Toshiba’s are the best. I have 40+ 2TB to 4TB drives for video and photos. I built computers in the 90s and tested computer components for a living in the 2000’s… Go with Toshiba!

TomLeogrande

FWIW – WD did replace the two – 4TB drives but I refuse to use them as I know they will die as well. They are nice anchors for a boat if you need them.

Tsakalos

I think that you overexaggerate a bit my friend…

Johnny D.

This doesn’t surprise me at all considering their 1tb drives are complete junk too. So what if their return process is fast and easy if you have to return faulty drives every few months? Their drives are JUNK.

Ekard

Sigh, this is a piss poor cash grab. Whomever is bringing this lawsuit against Seagate, I highly doubt they are a very technical person. Just about anyone who truly understood the backblaze report, knew that the Seagate drives where not in a “normal” consumer environment. To me the report didn’t show that you shouldn’t buy Seagate drive for normal use but that there are drives with much better tolerances out there.

So here is hoping that this lawsuit is quickly resolved in Seagate’s favor.

Wussupi83

I disagree, I think this legal case has plenty of merit. That being said, I do agree with you if someone bought 100 Ford Focuses for a race track and 30% of them don’t make it past 20,000 miles while Ford touted 100,000 miles (just play along, this is to make a point, not to debate the finer point of engine or car mechanics), would you say Ford made a bad car or would you say that a normal consumer does not drive their Ford Focus under constant racetrack conditions? I think most people would agree that those are unrealistic expectations for that car.

However, we don’t know if Backblaze is a “racetrack”, these drives may be getting hit with an enormous amount of spontaneous read/writes each day or they might serve as backups and only write nightly file changes and are seldom called upon for reads, therefore; the legal case has grounds worth examining. But Joel did a pretty good job of stating, regardless of legal outcome – the court of public opinion is the one they must really win.

Ekard

Except we do know some of the conditions that the drives will be subject to at backblaze. We know that the drives will be subject to more vibrations than if they where used in a normal consumer environment. We also know that the drive is going to filled relatively fast compared to consumer use. The drive will also have a higher probability of sustaining more writes than it would in normal consumer.

Wussupi83

None of those are facts. A consumer can put multiple drives in their computer and have multiple fans causing harsh vibration. A consumer can fill their drive quickly. Writes are highly variable depending on where in Backblazes storage processes these drives were used. Even several consumer storage software solutions are intelligent enough to not rewrite the same data over and over. I’m not saying you’re wrong, i’my saying your argument makes the grounds for a legal case more apparent.

Ekard

While yes, a consumer could do all those things but that is not normal consumer behavior.

However, a consumer application of the drive will not produce the vibrations that enterprise rack of HDDs produce. Backblaze has 90 drives per pod and these sit in racks of multiple pods. Vibrations kill drives and enterprise class drives are designed to reduce vibrations while being more tolerant of vibrations.

They could have 500 hard drives per pod and still be designed sturdier than your aluminum computer case sitting on the floor next to your foot. Please show me the evidence that a Backblazes pod subjects a hard drive to more vibration than a legally defined ‘average’ non-enterprise external drive enclosure, computer case or NAS.

Ekard

It would have to be shown that Backblaze’s use of the drives (the main evidence if you will) was not a deviation from normal consumer use for the lawsuit to have any teeth at this point. In my experience, I would say that Backblaze is using the drives for a purpose that Seagate never designed the drives to support.

Regardless, Seagate doesn’t have to prove the drives are not faulty. They only have to cast doubt on the evidence. If this is the only evidence the plaintiffs have, they do not have much of a lawsuit.

Also, please note: The “sturdier” an enclosure is, the more prone it will be to passing on the vibrations from one drive to the next. Which is why good cases include rubber grommets to reduce vibration from spinning media. Even though the Backblaze pods are designed to reduce vibration, there is only so much you can do within a budget. When you are talking 450+ HDDs, the racks will be “humming”.

Wussupi83

1.) Do you or have you worked work for Backblaze while these drives were deployed?
2.) Did you work with these drives and are you aware of the exact scenerios these drives were used in?
3.) Could you please fill the rest of us in?

Chase Champion

Fyi there was an article on here before explaining the exact testing scenario backblaze uses…. use the search feature :P

Wussupi83

Thank you for that information, I didn’t find the exact article you were
referencing that points out the exact scenarios but here’s what I
found:. Backblaze has worked to standardize their data to reflect more
‘uniform’ workloads, also they purchase the cheapest drives available
(leading to the assumption that there aren’t more robust drives in a
front-end and cheaper drives like this in the back-end – meaning these
drives could be getting hit hard), they’ve worked to reduce vibration in
their storage pods (but no exact data on how much or what kind of forces
they are exposed to) and they are used in an ‘enterprise environment’. I also took the time to check BackBlazes blog – in their you’ll find an interesting study they did were they tested durability of Enterprise vs Commercial drives – during the first 3 years of the study they found no difference in failure rate (that was all the time they had before they published the study) – meaning that the enterprise drives (although they had a smaller sample size) were performing no better under the same workloads. It’s also important to note here that Backblaze wrote about the failure of these Seagate drives within the first 3 years of their operation – so if you compare their ‘enterprise vs commercial’ study against these 3TB Seagate failure – there is no evidence to say they would have fared any better on the pure fact that these were a consumer product not an enterprise one.

Now again, none-of-this is legal fact. Although I never intended to get into this discussion, since you so kindly provided some good information I will refer back to my original point that I wanted to make – that this legal case has legs and is worth looking at – not a money grab.

There is an article on Tom’s Hardware that explains the pitfalls of using Backblaze’s report better than I ever could. The lawsuit seems to be using Backblaze’s report as its main evidence. I doubt Seagate will have an issue casting doubt on the report, considering Backblaze themselves stated that they used the drives in a way that violated the drives warranty.

Wussupi83

Thank you, yes I read that article this morning and commented (look for ‘wussupi83’) – However, if you read the comments, most of them are inflammatory against Seagate and the article itself – so yeah an article is great but it’s still just a tech journalist writing it, not a tech a lawyer with facts of the case. But lets look over some points.
This lawsuit was not filed by Backblaze, it was filed by a normal ‘non-commercial’ consumer using Backblaze evidence to support the claim. The class-action was just filed, there is still plenty of time for non-commercial victims to come forward and provide more evidence. Either way – I’ve never once claimed that the class-action will be won – I’ve simply stated that it is a justifiable class-action claim against Seagate.

Ekard

And the point I was making, with the available information on the lawsuit, is that it looks like a cash grab and is borderline frivolous. It is early but if the major evidence is the Backblaze report, then there isn’t much of case. Honestly, it looks like they are trying to get others to “Sign up” for the lawsuit at this point.
The Issue I have with this lawsuit, is that it seems to be using the Backblaze report as its reason for existing. Which is flawed interpretation of the data. Which leads me to think this is a cash-grab.

My 3TB Seagate drive died really soon. Am I being doubted on too? Stop trying to defend Seagate if you don’t even work for them (you don’t, right?).

Wussupi83

Also, could you please let us know what the failure rate of these drives were outside of Backblaze? So we can compare to Backblaze numbers, thank you.

Fast_Turtle

From the BackBlaze Report – not only weren’t the drives in a normal consumer Environment, they were all purchase soon after the drives hit the market. On the Lawsuit front, I agree it’s a money grab by the Lawyers pushing for a Class Action Suit because the data they’re using is going to be completely thrown out as acceptable since Seagate had no opurtunity to examine any drives under warranty. Backblaze doesn’t bother with Warranty Returns, which is why the purchase the cheapest drives they can get.

Archetype

They should also look into the other DM001 models. The 2 TB (ST2000DM001) versions are just as bad with early failures from my experience and what I have seen on the review sites and forums.

Alan Goldman

Yes, very much so.

Riely Rumfort

LoL
Key to seagate in my opinion(have 1 of my 7 drives) is keeping the bugger cool.
Seagates external or internal heat up twice as fast as other drives. I cool it as I fill it, still never trust the mofo though.

Kyle

I’m still rocking one of these 3TB drives after a year of heavy use. So far, it seems to be working alright. I’m probably one of the lucky ones.

One of my 1TB Seagate drives on the other hand has been making very strange noises. I expect it to die soon, but that’s my game HDD anyway. Nothing I can’t re-download overnight. I have been using that drive since 2012 very heavily, and I’m honestly impressed that it lasted so long.

Seagate is a gamble. Either you’ll get a solid drive that lasts a long time, or you get something that goes down in a screaming fit of terror. My results have been mostly positive though.

Conservative411

Who buys Seagate anymore? I stopped buying those slow and loud drives back in the 90’s. Today its all about Samsung SSD.

Mavrik

Oddly the Seagate Slim Backups drives are best in-class, offering the thinnest, fastest, and most memory drives over their competitors. That’s pretty much it though.

Conservative411

You are correct. I do in fact have a Seagate USB drive that has worked fine for years. I do not put them into a system to run the OS though.

Lonnie Veal

Back in the early 90’s Seagate was first choice because we were introduced to PC’s with Seagate Drives when the Consultants supplied our hardware….

Afterward I went DIY by the late 90’s, I couldn’t pin it down, but every time an Office Machine failed…it was a dead seagate.

Lord, when I could stand in a room and HEAR a PC: it wasn’t the Case Fan. It was the Seagate Hard-drive.

When I stopped buying Seagate drives, the Failure rates of my office boxes dipped. And most importantly, I stopped worrying about my Servers. And then I remember getting a Free Seagate drive from Newegg as a bonus for a large order…I threw that thing straight into the trash. It was still sealed in the anti-stat bag. Because when someone starts giving something away for FREE outta nowhere, that’s NOT a Good sign!

When I saw the BlackBlaze article, my first thought was: “Ahah! So, I was right!”
Then my second Thought was: “How in Heck could a Seagate Exec even show his face in public when a study shows his product is dreck compared to WD?”

They deserve this suit. Especially since I knew so many people were buying the Seagate USB drives…those sealed boxes which weren’t even designed for the user to change the drive like a real NAS, and a warned a lot of people that their so-called Backup to that thing was only as good as the Seagate Inside it.

Fast_Turtle

And yet my experience is complete opposite of yours as I’ve had no seagate drives fail under warranty – Still have a 250GB Barraccuda that’s been in service since 2003 along with one of these supposedly supsect 3TB drives.Over the last couple of Decades, I’ve had Maxtor, WD, IBM, Samsung, Hitachi Drives all fail on me while under warranty but None of my Seagates have. Who’s data is better?As to the data being used in a Class Action Suit, it’s completely suspect as Backblaze states in their failure report, that none of the drives were returned for Warranty Replacement and they were all purchased within a 3 month period. It’s quite possible there was a problem with the early drives that Seagate was able to identify and correct but Backblaze wasn’t able to take advantage of due to their Policies.

Sasha Gracanin

I have three of these drives running as we speak. No problems whatsoever. I keep them cool though, open case and none of them are my system drive, purely mass storage.

Matsumoto

I got 6 ST3000DM001 and all failed in 1.1~1.3 years. And seagate only gives 1 year warranty. Meanwhile all my WD RED 3TB still alive.

Rawr

This is probably for the best imo. Maybe it’ll get SG to rework the whole production line process to be more ‘reliable’. Of all the SG hdd’s I have ever had in the previous years, majority of them failed for me but then to be fair, SG hdd’s are the cheapest for cost vs the other companies selling hdd’s on sale. It’s somewhat a gamble if you go the SG route as some of the hdd’s DO work flawlessly as intended. Heck I still have a ST3500630AS hdd in use 24/7 for 8 years, 33 days, 9 hours as of now.

These are a mixed bag though as of now:
ST2000DM001
ST2000DX001
ST3000DM001
ST4000DX001
ST6000DM001

jwillis84

Actually they just “bought” HGST which BackBlaze reports is Top of the line at survivial rates.. promising “not to mess” with them. So if you mean re-working the line.. I think they are trying to “buy their way” out of the problem. They just have unreliable engineering on their regular drive lines. And the new Shingle technology gives me “goosebumps” and not in a good way, overlapping the concentric tracks because the magnetic heads can’t be made smaller on the existing “discs” sounds like they are just trying to avoid more surface area at the expense of short term and long term hardware reliability.

Charles Wallinger

I am writing this on one now a replacement drive which works better then the first one did so they must of fixed the issue at least it appears so rma was easy form online cost $10 to mail it to Ca. about a month later got a used repaired drive warr. was still good on it so at least I wasn’t out any money runs now at 29c-30c not sure if that is hot for a typical drive or not seems ok but it makes one wonder if it would be safe to put anything on one of these drives.

Solaris X

Rather, I still fail to understand why is Seagate still alive if we all have always known their drives sucked like this and refrained from buying them at all. Who the heck kept it alive?

I’ve never had a Quantum or Seagate drive fail on me. I’ve had terrible experiences with Western Digital, which I haven’t used for about 18 years, after my Quantum drives. SInce then I’ve only used Seagate’s but I’m thinking of going Toshiba for my next drive.

Fast_Turtle

I’ve been interested in this as I have one of the Supposedly Affect drives, yet it’s been in service for over a year now and I’ve had no issues with it. When I first saw the failure information from Backblaze, they provided full breakdown as to Quantity Purchased and what percentage of the drives were failing. Where Seagates Lawyers are going to break the class action case is the key fact that Backblaze did not return any drives under warranty. Simply put, this makes the failure data completely suspect from the Courts perspective and Seagate’s Lawyers are going to hammer that issue home with a 10 ton hammer. Sorry Folks but it’s not going to be pretty in regards to the class action status.

Papagiglio

Not to jinx myself, but I purchased four of these drives in 04-2012. Running in a consumer Z68 Intel Raid 5 configuration, non-stop without issue. As with any manufacturer, they surely had some bad batches/products/models. You are fooling yourself if you think that any manufacturer hasn’t made its share of bad products and they are all like politicians until faced with proof. Doesn’t matter who makes your favorite product, Ford/Chevy, HP/Epson, D-Link/Linksys, Dell/Lenovo, Seagate/WD they will all let you down at some point. Customer service goes a long way at that point and Seagate has always quickly replace any drive I’ve sent that was under warranty. Heck, until the Backblaze studies, I preferred Seagate drives because of the amount of WD drives I replaced in consumer PCs.

Joel Hruska

I agree that we can expect some degree of failure in any product. The fact that the Seagate drives don’t follow the bathtub curve at all does suggest something more in play. Whether that means the drives had an actual issue in consumer workloads or not isn’t something we can determine at present.

oOXOo

I have 2 of these turds, 1 has already failed. I want to see some money you pricks.

The Watson

I have one of those too. Its on its last legs. Don’t have cash to replace it. Has anyone tried looking on Seagate site for support? Hard to find, had to Google. Thought maybe a fw update would help.. Just looking @SMART its a horrible drive period,however it’s still passing? Hiw can that be, over 50% of values are above threshold. I haven’t trusted SMART since the hd floods…

Tó

A bit of nitpicking: Those are drive platters, on the picture. Not the heads that destroyed them.

Willem Hillier

Well. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that my 2-month old 2TB Seagate will last a long time. Anyone else have any experience with these?

jwillis84

Personally I bought two of these 3 TB drives and they failed completely twice, I RMA’ed one less than two weeks after purchase. Then the replacements failed. I couldn’t afford the repeated cost of Shipping over and over again. They make customers pay for shipping back dead drives. [Even] brand new drives Under full Warranty! [Even] fresh RMA replacement drives they ship to you. I still have one drive and it is in the process of “failing” SMART is reporting relocation of sectors is excessive. I think it was just very bad engineering. I will not buy another 3 TB drive from Seagate. They are not trustworthy. If Legal needs demonstrated samples in a pristine power situation, with UPS, Surge protection and a very high quality PC Power supply.. I tried everything to keep them alive. Then I have a couple they can have.

John Clark

I had a few bad drives sitting around. Some were Seagate, some were WD. I opened up 2 Seagate drives. The platters were covered with some sort of dirt film, if you know what I mean. When I run a finger across the top plate, my finger got dirty. It took an effort to wash it off. Then I opened a few WD drives. Even though they were dead, the platters were pristine clean. They had this dark silver metallic look. I run my finger across the top plate, nothing stuck to my skin. All clean and nice. I am not an engineer, but I think that this filth in Seagate drives doesn’t help anything. Could it be something leaking from the bearings? I don’t care. Just by looking at it, I am done with Seagate for good.

Joel Hruska

The dirt film you are referring to may have been put there on purpose as part of the drive’s design. Without knowing more about the drive models I can’t speculate further.

ToothyGrinn

On the drives with the powder you will probably see a nice groove dug into the platter, that’s from the head crashing into the platter and ‘digging’ out the cobalt coating. (look on both sides)
Platters nowadays are made from glass with a coating of cobalt and other metals. Any powder added to a drive will be bonded with the platter.
And “SHOULD” stay stuck to it.

John Hammond

Wow? I thought that mine was just another bit of bad luck as I have had many failures over the past few years. Off to wind up DELL to see what they think of this debacle!

fjodor

Heh, I have this HDD from said time period and it just stopped responding properly a couple of weeks ago. Booting with the drive connected takes AAAGES and it’s impossible to detect the drive with linux or anything other than windows for some weird reason. Managed to save my files but the company I bought it from wants to replace it with another disk of the same sort…. Not sure I will use that one for anything else than a paperweight.

Good – any company that releases such a bad product deserves to be taken to task in the court room. However I think the hit to their reputation will be more than any courtroom settlement…

mhbgt

Backblaze’ data shows that the drives are suspect. There a hundreds of thousands of consumers all around the world who have lost their data. Mine failed yesterday (8 Feb 2016, HDD manufactured in 02/2012).

I too believed that a drive having fewer platters would be more reliable in the long term.

ToothyGrinn

Just had four out of box failures on SAS ST3450857SS drives

All spin up but fail to detect. Took em back to the supplier for fault finding and they confirmed they are faulty. Looks like a batch failure on simple 450 GB hard disks.
Not to mention there are obviously waaay more than four of them.

And yes, I tried three different raid controllers.

Oziumentisis

I just had 3 Seagate HDD’s die on me last week, all within the span of one week! 2x 2TB and 1x 3TB… Never again with I own a Seagate HDD…

Tsakalos

great news… my ST3000DM001 Just suddenly died …

Ashlord

I had 20 of these drives in my ZFS NAS at home. Replaced over 50 times. That’s right, replaced the replacements as well. Some didn’t last past 3 months. Eventually I got to the point where I can’t even trust the drive to complete the rebuild before failing, so I swapped all out to WD RED drives. After 2 years, only 2 (10%) WD RED failed.

Tsakalos

Great news… Duh…

Yuki_Sakuma

Dammit I have a 3TB Seagate used as programs and games while an SSD for boot. My 3TB is still a year old…I hope I get to be the lucky 3TB Seagate owner…

yea, I really want to stick a shotgun up the ass of whomever said releasing this broken shit was ok.

Greg Le Grand

Another example of failure : I did not have sex with that woman. Better to be forthcoming as you say.

Minority2

My Seagate also died this week. It was a “Backup Plus” 3TB external hard drive purchased at Costco about 3.5 years ago. Opening up the enclosure, there was this famous ST3000DM001. I wish I had this knowledge sooner.

cletuslira

Practical writing . For my two cents ,
others need to fill out a MHA RMA , my company filled out a template
document here http://goo.gl/GOK2b3.

Paul W

I’ve had a 2TB and 3TB, both M001 models, fail in the last 2 weeks.

GarySpatzScam .

3TB?? How about all sizes??? Gone through 5 of these stupid disks (1st one came in a FantomG3 external drive) 1.5TB. The disk died in 2 years, then they sent me a free one as it was still covered. That one lasted a few months… again another free replacement.

Free replacements bla bla blah… these were supposed to be used as backups, my backups need backups! I sent back the one they tried to use to shut me up, but no more! F!*#$ the free hard drives. Seagate SUCKS!!!! >:O Include all disk sizes in the lawsuit dang it!!!

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